Throw
another ad spending title on pharma’s growing pile.
Advertising Age’s annual ranking of the 200 leading national advertisers in the U.S.
found that pharma industry spending rose more than any other category,
increasing overall by 15.6% last year.
And
it was way ahead of the rest, too. Travel came in second at 10.1%, while
the apparel industry came in third with total ad spending rising by 6.9%.
Spending across all categories increased almost unanimously; only the food
category dropped, down 2.7%.
And
on Ad Age’s top 10 list of the fastest-growing spenders for the
year, half were pharma companies. Novo Nordisk ranked highest of those at No. 4
with a 195% spending increase year-over-year to reach $261 million. Valeant
Pharmaceuticals was No. 5 with an 88% increase to $441 million, followed by
GlaxoSmithKline at No. 6 with a 56% increase to $948 million in ad spending.
Novo
hiked its spending partly because of new competition for its GLP-1 diabetes
drug Victoza and its newly launched basal insulin Tresiba. Valeant laid
out big money for its toe-fungus med Jublia, while GSK has been pushing its new
suite of respiratory meds as it tries to build up sales in advance of copycat
competition for top-selling Advair.
Meanwhile,
Sanofi's spending rose 47% to $901 million to nab it the No. 9 spot, and Gilead
Sciences was No. 10 with a 36% spending increase, up to $391 million.
Sanofi was busy launching its basal insulin Toujeo--a head-to-head Tresiba
competitor--and Gilead backed up its hep C drugs in the face of new launches in
that field.
Ad Age
Datacenter estimates companies’ total U.S. spending by combining measured media
and unmeasured spending.
Ad Age
highlighted Bristol-Myers Squibb specifically in its coverage, pointing to the
$126 million spent on its immuno-oncology drug Opdivo alone, which just this
week scored a breakthrough designation from the FDA in advanced bladder
cancer. The magazine noted that Opdivo measured media spending increased 88% to
$419 million, based on tracking data from Kantar Media.
All
that pharma spending is pushing healthcare marketing at ad agencies, the
article noted. “Pharma spending is good news for agencies," its
authors wrote, noting that healthcare marketing was the fastest-growing
discipline last year for agencies, whose U.S. healthcare-related revenue jumped
8.7%.
- read Ad Age article